Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Today, I'm joined by Vivian Phung. Viv is the 23 year old solo founder of Snowball, a Web3 dev tools provider focused on mobile apps and webapps. Snowball's first product, Igloo, will give developers a simple solution for SSO authentication, AA smart wallet, and onramping in one SDK. Igloo is currently in private alpha on testnet.

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Today, I'm joined by Gami. Gami is a crypto creator and the founder of GnarsDAO, the skateboarding-centric nounish community.

Gami is one of a small number of practitioners in an emerging discipline that I call "crypto production." Gami led the creation of several onchain happenings, including GnarsDAO, a DAO dedicated to onboarding skaters to Web3, Forgeries, a nounish open edition and onchain Noun raffle, as well as an arts patronage dao, an onchain tontine, and much more.

In this episode, Gami and I discuss his creative practice, and how he manages to be so prolific. We discuss his positive sum philosophy, his belief that crypto is a counter cultural movement, and his collaborative working relationships with Iain Nash, Volkey, and 0xlght.

It was great getting a chance to chat with Gami, who is doing fascinating work summoning onchain happenings with social media and the blockchain. His perspectives on leadership were particularly surprising and exciting. I learned a lot from Gami in this call. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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(00:00:00) Introduction

Today's episode is all about EIP-7212.

To understand EIP-7212, first we need to talk about Passkeys.

Passkeys are a new authentication standard designed to replace passwords.

With passkeys, when you sign into an app or website, a passkey is generated on your device, and saved either locally, to a passkey manager, or to a hardware device like a Yubikey. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are adopting passkeys because they are more secure than the traditional username and password scheme.

Passkeys use the secp256r1 elliptic curve, or R1 for short. Bitcoin and Ethereum use the incompatible K1 variation. In other words, there is no built-in way to verify an R1 signature inside of a smart contract.

EIP-7212 proposes to add support for the R1 curve directly to the EVM as a precompiled contract, so that every modern device in the world will be able to sign smart wallet transactions natively, no software wallet required.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Ulaş Erdoğan, Jerome de Tychey, and Lionello Lunesu.

Ulaş Erdoğan is the co-author of EIP-7212. He is also the founder of Clave, an account abstraction smart wallet.

Jerome de Tychey is CEO of software dev firm Cometh, which are building AA smart wallets under their Alembic product line. He is also president of Ethereum France, which organizes EthCC.

Lionello Lunesu is an electrical engineer and software developer with experience building software and hardware wallets. Lionello was prototyping and writing about using the R1 curve on the EVM in 2016.

This episode is all about the pros and cons of adding an R1 precompile to the EVM.

This was an exciting conversation about a deep technical topic that could have major implications for mainstream adoption. I'm excited to share this panel, which gives insight into next gen wallet and authentication technology, and the Ethereum Improvement Proposal process. My thanks to Ulaş, Jerome, and Lionello!

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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(00:00:00) Introduction

My guest today is Henri Stern, CEO of Privy. Privy is an authentication and embedded wallet SDK. With Privy, dapp developers can allow their users to sign in with their existing wallet, or generate an embedded wallet associated with an email, SMS, or SSO provider such as AppleID or Gmail.

Privy's embedded wallet powers friend.tech, the breakout social dapp launched in August 2023. With Privy, friend.tech generates a new embedded wallet for each user that signs in, allowing the PWA dapp to sign transactions at the click of an HTML button element — no WalletConnect back-and-forth required.

Privy's 2/3 Shamir wallet option allows dapp developers to create self-custody wallets for their users, while Privy provides a password-protected recovery services in case users should lose access to their account or device.

On this episode we discuss Henri's experience studying under Dan Boneh, working on Filecoin at Protocol Labs with Juan Benet, and building Privy. We explore the ins-and-outs of Privy's embedded wallet architecture and discuss what's next in wallets.

It was a pleasure diving into the emerging embedded wallet and account abstraction smart wallet stack with Henri, who is a clear thinker and humble decentralization minded builder. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:05:01) Protocol labs, and how Privy started

(00:09:38) Heterogeneous wallets cater to diverse user expectations.

(00:12:13) Product decision made, focus on embedded wallets - Building stable wall connectors and library is difficult.

(00:21:11) Wallet authentication process: SMS verification and key sharing.

(00:25:14) Web tokens authenticate user and holder. Off share only accessible by user. Single device operations with iframe and key. Typical 90% usage scenario.

(00:29:48) Privy uses hardware security module. It encrypts recovery shares and tracks devices for added security.

(00:43:43) Fear of EOA, comparing Shamir and multi sig.

(00:47:21) Account abstraction allows for smart wallets.

(00:54:43) Main NetEase locked in app, no control.

(01:00:48) Exciting fintech innovations cater to diverse users.

(01:04:19) Balancing user control while empowering developers and users.

(01:08:25) Enabling interoperable wallets in the Web3 space.

(01:13:35) Few relevant DeFi apps; WalletConnect is problematic.

(01:23:46) Apple offers secure self-custody wallets with social recovery.

(01:26:01) Privy is a secure cross-platform custodian.

My guests today are John C. Palmer, Steve Klebanoff, and Danny Aranda, founding members of PartyDAO, creators of the Party Protocol.

Party is a dapp for onchain group coordination. With Party, a small group of friends or a large group of strangers can come together to raise funds and buy an NFT, trade tokens, or complete any other onchain activity together. Party is a group wallet with onchain governance, designed to allow parties of people to move quickly and get things done onchain.

On this episode, John, Danny and Steve explain how they have expanded Party's purview from the original Partybid group NFT purchasing experience, to the Party Protocol, which is more flexible. The new Party allows people to crowdfund ETH without a predefined acquisition target, or sell party memberships as timed and limited editions.

Operators, a new feature launched just one day before this recording, solves a sticky problem familiar to multisig signers and onchain DAO members alike. When coordinating to execute time sensitive onchain transactions like a DEX token swap, Safe multisigs and Governor DAOs often have difficulty, as the swap orders they collectively approve expire and would revert, by the time constituents have signed the transaction or voted on the proposal.

Party Operators allow party members to vote on an intent, which describes parameters like the tokens to be swapped and an acceptable exchange rate, as well delegate execution of the swap to qualified party members. Operators separate voting on transaction intents from their execution, solving the delays that plague existing onchain coordination schemes.

Towards the end of the call we talk about the brand vision, values, and aesthetic choices the team has made, which represent a unique perspective amongst their peers.

It's always a great time getting together with the PartyDAO crew to discuss their perspective and approach to building tasteful crypto products. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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Chapters

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:09:37) Two axes of coordination in crypto: on-chain/off-chain, economic/social.

(00:11:50) Categories of on-chain coordination

(00:20:36) Group bids to fractionalize NFTs

(00:25:24) Introducing new protocol with diverse use cases.

(00:33:07) 3 components of the product: group formation, decision-making, execution.

(00:39:16) Party can be used for group activities like trading NFTs.

(00:41:47) Ethereum group solutions for regular consumers.

(00:50:02) New proposal type separates consensus and execution.

(00:52:18) Three parts: UX, gas cost, security risk

(00:57:50) Intense conversation about general intent and behavior.

(01:02:32) Choosing qualified executors and protecting best interests.

(01:09:47) Consumer-focused crypto product.

(01:23:46) Open-source protocol seeks developers for collaboration.

(01:29:56) Using ETH to fund proposals.

(01:33:03) Party fund projects, release NFTs

(01:36:43) Crypto parties generate revenue through competition.

My guest today is Paul Razvan Berg. Paul is a longtime Solidity developer whose open source tools, including prb-math and prb-proxy, are integrated into many Ethereum contracts and protocols. Paul is also the co-founder and lead developer of Sablier, the token streaming protocol which launchced its v2 in July 2023.

On this episode, Paul and I go in-depth on three topics. First, we discuss a handful of his influential open source repos. Second, we talk about testing in Foundry and recap the Branch Tree Technique test writing framework that Paul presented at EthCC this year. Finally, we cover Sablier, its origins, and what's new in the recently launched v2. In the course of discussing Sablier, we also touch on PRBProxy, which is a new proxy implementation that Paul believes is a great update to Maker's DSProxy.

This was an excellent conversation and it was a pleasure learning from Paul, who is not only a brilliant and expert Solidity dev, but also a generous soul. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided for entertainment and education purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto is risky and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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My guest today is Tom S. Lehman, who goes by Middlemarch on Twitter. Tom is the creator of Ethscriptions, an NFT standard for inscribing base64 encoded URIs in the data field of EVM transactions. Prior to Ethscriptions, Tom was co-founder and CEO of popular lyrics site and content company Genius.

Ethscriptions are inspired both by Bitcion Inscriptions and the Ethereum practice of appending hex encoded UTF-8 strings to the data field of regular transactions, a gesture that has been used by hackers and artists to communicate onchain.

The best way to think of Ethscriptions is as an alternative to smart contracts. Instead of executing and verifying logic onchain inside of a function call in an EVM smart contract, Ethscriptions leave the validation of minting and transfer events to offchain indexers, which can follow the protocol's standard to decide whether transactions mutated Ethscription state. Instead of reverting invalid transactions when they're sent, Ethscriptions indexers ignore them, despite their successful inclusion in the chain. This makes Ethscriptions a more Bitcoin-style protocol experiment, where a new software reads new meaning into data stored using existing rudimentary blockchain affordances.

At the same time, Ethscriptions is an artistic meditation that questions the presumed legitimacy of L2s and NFT standards like ERC-721, which both make certain assumptions about how meaning should be stored and computed on Ethereum and other EVMs.

It was fantastic talking with Tom who is an energetic builder and independent thinker. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided for entertainment and education purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto is risky and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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Ethscriptions.com

The infamous

TechCrunch Disrupt appearance (2013)

My guest today is Decent co-founder and CTO Will Kantaros. Decent is an NFT service provider that has helped over a thousand creators deploy NFT projects to Polygon and other EVMs. According to Will, hundreds of thousands of collectors have minted over six million NFTs on Decent's contracts.

Their new product The Box is a web checkout SDK that lets users pay for Mints and other transactions on one chain, with assets held on another.

On this episode, Will and I discuss Decent's evolution from a NFT dev studio into an NFT infrastructure provider, their shifting focus to cross chain interactions, and the infrastructure choices they're making to enable cross chain minting.

It was good to get to know Will and hear how they're approaching cross-chain transaction user experience design, which is only becoming more important by the day. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided for entertainment and education purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto is risky and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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My guest today is Christian Montoya, Senior Project Manager of Metamask Snaps.

Metamask Snaps is a major upgrade to Metamask slated for September 2023. Snaps transforms Metamask into a programmable platform, roughly akin to an App Store. Snaps is an execution environment where third party developeres can, if granted permission by the user, run sandboxed Secure ECMAScript as a user prepares to make a transaction, or periodically in the background.

Snaps will debut in the browser extension, but Christian hints in this conversation that Snaps will eventually find their way to the mobile app, too.

On this episode, Christian and I discuss what it's like building inside of Metamask and Consensys. Christian fields my various gripes about the Metamask UI with grace. Then we dive into Snaps: the tech stack, it's security, and the user experience affordances it provides third party devs. We cover lots of nitty gritty technical details that shed light on the Metamask Snaps thesis and provide hints at how listeners might start thinking about designing Snaps, which are set to launch imminently.

It was great getting to know Christian better and learning about the Snaps project from one of the key people involved. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided for entertainment and education purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto is risky and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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My guest today is Reservoir founder Peter Watts. Reservoir is an NFT API provider that makes it easy to build cross-chain NFT interactivity into any app.

On this episode, Peter shares how he got his start building music and streaming apps and how music NFTs led him to starting Reservoir with a co-founder he had never met in person. We discuss Reservoir's demand driven approach to development prioritization, how they deal with tech debt, and why it is that no one else is making a unified read/write API for cross-chain NFT markets yet.

It was fun learning from Peter how Reservoir manages to develop so much tooling accross so many dapps and chains.

As always, this show is provided for entertainment and education purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto is risky and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

And now, I hope you enjoy the show.